There are currently many forms of snowshoes intended for hiking over snow. In general, a snowshoe has a bearing surface whose area is very much greater than that of the sole of a boot, this being in order to gain a wide purchase on the snow and distribute the pressure corresponding to the user's weight, and thus to prevent him from sinking into the snow.
At the same time, this bearing surface has means for fastening the user's boot. A number of alternative embodiments of this type of snowshoe are known. A wide variety of different forms have thus been proposed. It has been proposed to make this bearing surface openworked in order to save weight. It has also been proposed to allow the boot to be articulated to the bearing surface in order to make walking less difficult.
Using snowshoes of this type, the user progresses by walking over snow-covered surfaces, either uphill, on the flat or downhill.
In other words, a traditional snowshoe is intended for progressing step by step over snow while preventing any sliding. A downhill slope is therefore fairly difficult to negotiate because of the momentum due to the skier's mass, which might cause him to topple forward.
Documents U.S. Pat. No. 2,410,702 have proposed to equip a ski with two folding side wings constituting partial snowshoes.
More precisely, on each of its sides, the ski has a set of hinges which allow the two side wings to pivot in order to move them from a position in which they are parallel to the surface of the ski, corresponding to walking in snowshoe configuration, to a position in which they are raised to the side, in order to use just the ski function.
However, this device has several drawbacks, namely, on the one hand, that hinges are difficult to use from the point of view of reliability under the wet and icy conditions which are encountered when hiking over snow.
On the other hand, when the device is in a gliding configuration, the raised position of the wings, and in particular of the inner wings which face one another from one foot to the other, pose a problem of encumbrance and hinder the user's progress.
The problem which the invention proposes to solve is therefore to make it easier for the snowshoe to progress in downhill regions, using a device which is simple, ergonomic and mechanically robust.